


The Fine Art of Fitting In

by Valmouth



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Gen, Moving On
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-09
Updated: 2012-07-09
Packaged: 2017-11-09 11:33:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,450
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/454982
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Valmouth/pseuds/Valmouth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post-show. Nobody could take Elizabeth Weir's place, and Woolsey expected fitting in to be... difficult. But he is a very good diplomat, enough so that he can accept when part of fitting in is to remove himself when necessary.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Fine Art of Fitting In

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I own no rights to the TV show 'Stargate: Atlantis', or to it's characters, concepts, plots etc. I mean no offence by posting this and make no money from it.

He knew it was going to happen.

The Atlantis Expedition has never taken to anyone since Elizabeth Weir was... lost, to them.

He wonders sometimes if it’s the fact that she never actually died. That she’s still alive in some way, floating around in space as nanite consciousness in a machine-created body.

He wonders if the Atlantis expedition would agree that this is the reason they can’t move on.

But anyway, they made sure he knew it wasn’t his place to wonder about it. No changes, no discussion- don’t rock the boat. His place was to be a nominal figurehead who made all the big names back on Earth happy and left the Inner Circle of Power to run the show in the Pegasus Galaxy.

He’s almost completely sure they don’t know he calls them that.

But it is true. Atlantis is actually run by Colonel Sheppard and Dr. McKay, and, to some extent, by Carson Beckett, Jennifer Keller, Radek Zelenka, Evan Lorne and a few other scientists. If it comes down to it, Teyla Emagen has a highly respected vote on their diplomatic approach to other cultures and planets, and Ronon Dex, for all that he is a displaced refugee noted for his brawn more than his brains, can stop a roomful of people with a few decisive words.

And those words are not always threatening.

Richard Woolsey is a lot of things but he isn’t stupid. True power does not come into the Atlantis Expedition in the shape of titles or rank or chain of command or policy, it comes into it in the shape of the people everyone looks to when everything goes wrong.

And he himself, he is frustrated to note, looks to the Circle of Power to solve the problems.

He reconciles himself to this when he stops being ashamed of it. He is no soldier or scientist or doctor. What he is, is a diplomat.

He is a very, very good diplomat.

And he set himself out to be diplomatically important to the Atlantis Expedition. It wasn’t hard. John Sheppard is a lot of things but he is not known for his diplomacy. Rodney McKay is liable to start a war if they turn him loose on unsuspecting cultures. The medical doctors cannot lead an army, Ronon Dex does not want the job and it was not seemly for Teyla Emmagen to have it.

Of them all, he watched her the most closely. And he was interested to note that she realised it. She was sensible and delicate about the matter; she conceded to him prettily and with no need on either side for useless shows of bravado.

 So Woolsey had his job.

And he was, unsurprisingly, good at it. Good enough that he knows he was accepted; felt it in the way that people approached him. Because, of course, what the Circle of Power cannot do is solve the _little_ problems- logistics and arguments and personal differences.

Some of which, Woolsey was amused to note, stemmed from the Circle of Power being the kind of people that they are. The number of complaints against Dr. McKay is staggering. Not unexpected, but still, rather large. And Colonel Sheppard is not, perhaps, the most qualified military commander in terms of the day-to-day running of a highly stressed body of military personnel.

Petty grievances against ‘aliens’ are apt to crop up, the medical doctors squabble over the ethical use of certain procedures versus the results at hand, there are days off to be considered, incentive schemes, morale, trade, and all-in-all, he had enough to do managing the paperwork without concerning himself with the emergency security procedures of the city during a prospective Wraith attack.

Though he did concern himself with it. The two hour meeting with Evan Lorne offered him some interesting insights into the mindset of the expedition as a whole.

The soldiers are unflinchingly loyal to Sheppard, and Major Lorne made a carefully worded allusion to how rare it is to see hardbitten marines give their unflinching loyalty to a man who is basically just a chopper pilot. What’s even more interesting is how similar this was to the meeting Woolsey had with Dr. Zelenka.

It wasn’t hard, once he knew what his place was, once he knew what the mindset was. He saw traces of Elizabeth Weir everywhere he looked, still sleeping in the forms and folders and approach to the mission.

He saw it in the way people looked at him, until the one evening that John Sheppard turned up at his apartment and consented to a drink with him.

Woolsey looked at the sunset across the ocean and in the end it had actually been easy to weave himself into the fabric of Atlantis. No changes, no discussion- don’t rock the boat. Just let the expedition do what it did, and when necessary, exert the right amount of pressure in just the right place to nudge it gently towards the right direction.

Lieutenant Colonel Sheppard stopped by every few days after that, and Woolsey would have been surprised, if he hadn’t been amused by the sneaking suspicion that Sheppard just likes single malt and the almost alien luxury Woolsey’s allowed in his suite.

He’s aware of the Sheppard family connection, is perfectly knowledgeable of the lifestyle Sheppard was born to, and would guess that while John is not given to enjoying that lifestyle, a glance at it every now and again feeds a little part of his soul labelled ‘home’.

Woolsey, true to his reading of Sheppard’s character, never pushed the illusion. Didn’t stop it either. He played his cards by doing absolutely nothing, because in the end, John Sheppard was in the Inner Circle of Power and Woolsey needed his vote to stay relevant in the game.

He remembers Colonel Everett, and he remembers the report, the veiled allusion to Sheppard pushing for Weir’s inclusion at the start of the first Wraith siege, when the military did what they were prone to do and tried to take over command.

Sheppard hadn’t succeeded then but he is liable to succeed now. To some extent at least, and Woolsey preferred not to be end up sidelined. Preferred to retain the illusion of the illusion of command, with just enough influence in reserve to use when it truly mattered.

It worked.

He is a very, very good diplomat.

But going to Earth he’d suspected that it would happen.

Nobody is less surprised than he is when the command structure is drastically rearranged.

‘Your talent’ is the chosen phrase and he bows his head to the sharp, impersonal smiles of his fellow diplomats, to the unsmiling grimness of Stargate Command.

‘Your talent’ means that he dismantles his apartment on Atlantis less than four days after the City lands in the water off the coast of San Francisco, pedantically packing and re-packing the boxes with the luxuries he has allowed himself.

Major Lorne and a contingent of soldiers stationed on Atlantis are scheduled to accompany him to Cheyenne Mountain. They will all be beamed aboard the Hammond when they are ready.

Sheppard turns up at the door of the empty, bared apartment and Woolsey quirks an eyebrow at him.

This is something else Elizabeth Weir did. She made the expedition what it is. She took on Rodney when no one in the SGC had wanted to. She hired Carson against all the more qualified candidates that were presented. And she defended John Sheppard from replacement. She had had Sheppard promoted, re-contracted, and cemented into the fabric of Atlantis. That in itself is one of her fingerprints.

Woolsey hands over the half-full bottle of whiskey. ‘For visiting dignitaries’ is his excuse.

And Sheppard looks at him as if he doesn’t get it and is a little too afraid to ask.

There are certainly going to be plenty of opportunities for that bottle to be opened on Atlantis now.

Woolsey pulls strings and applies a tiny point of pressure just where it’s needed, and John Sheppard stays where he is. Dr. McKay is ‘needed’ on other projects but Sheppard has some pull of his own now and it turns out that if Rodney McKay can’t leave Atlantis for other projects, other projects can certainly be sent to Atlantis for Rodney McKay to oversee.  

The price Woolsey pays is that he goes back to his old apartment in Washington. He opens the windows and unpacks his boxes, and then he strips off his uniform and puts on a suit.

Because Atlantis is in the past, down on his resume as someplace he has been, and just as he knew would happen, the time has come to move on.

 


End file.
